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While speaking with Teri, it became clear how her creative process and work
reflect the importance of Native American history and education on both a
personal and wide scale level. In the second part of our interview, we
discuss the representation of Native Americans in mainstream culture and the
art world, and the very universal concern for the type of world we’ll leave for
our children and the generations that follow us.

You made an interesting
point about hoping to educate people, drawing them in through art. In some of your bio information you talk
about the use of the Sunboys--- wanting that superhero story
to be told for your sons. Were they able
to engage with that right away or did it take some time?

All of my beadwork starts with drawings first. I simplify them down, as simple as I can make
it as line drawings, almost like a coloring book. Then I work my color in and my lines in and
all of that. When my sons were really
little, I made copies of those drawings on the computer and gave them to them
as coloring pages. My idea was that just
like any coloring book, or any kind of engagement with a child, that if they
interact with it, they don’t even know that they’re learning from it.

That’s how our calendars work, those old Kiowa
calendars. All pictoral calendars work
that way - people draw them and then by engaging with the events they depict,
they come to appreciate the history. I feel like all of my pieces are like
those calendars. It’s an event, it’s a thing that happened. Oral history has
often been shared with the help of images. We didn’t have written languages so
visual markers helped remind us of stories. That is what my intent was with the
Sunboyz work I have done. People can read those shoes and know that is Grandma
Spiderwoman, that’s the half-boys, and that’s the lightning bolt that struck
them down.

I wanted my children to be able to read the story. So far,
so good. All you can do as a parent and as an educator is introduce them to it.
You talk to them about it and engage them with it in some way, and then
hopefully it sticks. In the traditional
form of learning – of Native learning - we live, a child shows interest in
something, we encourage it, and then we let them go.

Either they follow through
with it or they don’t. We encourage them,
but they have to make their own mistakes throughout it. With my kids – a lot of my big work comes
from me thinking about what I want them to know: What do I want them to know about me? What do
I want them to know about our family? What do I want them to know about Kiowa
people, and what do I want them to know about Native America? Native history, Native culture, certainly
when my babies were born all that stuff really flooded into me: What am I doing
here? What’s my purpose on this planet? Who cares? Who cares what I have to say? And then I realized that this was important
information that was given to me that I need to give to them, so a lot of work
was inspired by what I wanted to tell them.

We have a photo of
the piece Fancy Dancin B’ballers… in
which you beaded a pair of high-heeled sneakers. People seem surprised at seeing beaded Native
American imagery in a modernized context.
Which can be perplexing, because of course Native American culture has
always been very much alive.

I’ve been battling that battle since my first breath on this
planet. I’ll never forget in high
school, I was in high school, my American history class, like a good little
American kid, and there was literally one paragraph in the 1800s that talked
about Native America in my history book.
One paragraph. And it was one of
those big American history books. And I
remember I read it like ten times, and I remember thinking, “This can’t be
it.” I remember going to my history
teacher and asking, “Why is there only one paragraph about Native History in
here?” The high school I went to was
about 16 miles off one of the largest reservations in the United States, Wind
River in Wyoming. I grew up with my
parents, and even though my father is white, we were Native, and we lived on
the res[ervation] and all our good friends were Native – so in my mind I was
like, “How do they not know this stuff?”

And then as I got out into the world -- to California and to college --I
really realized, “Alright. We don’t exist.
We don’t exist in American history, we don’t exist in American culture
outside of stereotypes. We just don’t
exist.” Fighting that idea that we don’t
exist, that we haven’t existed, that we’re not important to what is America,
will be something I will do for the rest of my life. Every single time I make a piece in which I
show modern day Indians, I force the viewer to consider that we do still
exist. And I know, I’m obviously not the
only Native person that has dealt with this.
This is something that happens across Native America, across the
board.

In your piece NDN Art you directly reference
Lichtenstein’s Art! - I found it
fascinating that you chose to include a very identifiable Native American
figure while Lichtenstein’s iconic piece uses a disembodied voice. Can you
speak more as to how you came to that decision to include the figure for the
piece?

Basically, that piece came out of the popular question that
interviewers were asking all the Native artists: “Do you consider yourself a
Native artist or an artist?” That was
the question asked of every Native artist in every single interview that year
[2006]. It really stuck in my craw. I wanted to reply, “I am both. How about
that?” I am a Native artist, my subject
matter is Native, I have a Native story to tell --- I can’t be authentic
without telling that story. However, I
would also like to consider myself an artist and not be pigeonholed or
ghettoized into some sort of anthropological definition of what Native art is.

Lichtenstein did that specific piece because at that time,
they were asking themselves the same kind of question – What is art? What does
it mean? And the bottom line of that
question of are you a Native artist or are you an artist, the real question
is: Are you making art?

I thought “What is Indian Art?” was an invalid question from
the get-go. It just means that you don’t
have an understanding of what we do, and how it’s placed in the continuum of
art on the planet. I wanted to subvert
this question and make it mine, and to do this I wanted to use stereotypical
Native imagery – a war bonnet. Are we a stereotype? Am I traditional? I’m traditionally beading; however, I’m
beading in neon colors, referencing Lichtenstein. It was one of those things where hopefully
everything about the piece questioned every single thing that tried to define
it.

You have been
involved with the ambitious new publication First American Art. What drew you to it,
and are you going to pursue more projects with them?

[The editor] America Meredith has been a friend of mine for
several years now. She is one of those amazing people who are driven by the
thought, “Let’s do it all.” Why aren’t
Native Americans writing their own critiques, why are we always letting others
critique and write the theory for our pieces? We know that we could do it
ourselves. We are so many generations
now into college education: my mother had a little bit of college, I’m a
graduate, my kids are going to be graduates, too. And we don’t have an excuse anymore for not
writing for ourselves.

All the books you read, articles that you read, 9 out of 10
of them are written by Anglo-theorists, anthropologists or art historians. But that’s changing, and so I jumped at the
chance.

She gave me the assignment of interviewing beadworkers – I
did an article on Orlando Dugi and then another one on Ken Williams. Since I
know the medium so intimately I was able to ask deeper questions. In a way, someone
who didn’t grow up in it can’t ask the same kinds of questions because they
don’t understand how things are done traditionally. Meredith got a potter who grew up working
with clay to do an interview about another potter. So the magazine is going to
be something different – I mean, that’s what I want to read. I want to read what artists are saying to each
other. Both Orlando and Ken are amazing people, and
I was really honored to be asked to interview them.

When people find that language and art definitions are limiting,
that’s when this magazine can really help.
That’s how having Native voices, Chicana voices, Black voices talking
about their own work --- that’s where those distinctions get broken down. Where that learning and communication happens
is the bottom line I strive for in everything I do: That moment of contact
between me, and the viewer, owner, collector, museum, whoever that is – that
point of communication -- And whether it’s jewelry or whether it’s artwork –
whatever it is --- if I can communicate in some way the human experience to
another human being, from own perspective, that’s why I do what I do.

Teri Greeves’ beadwork resonates with a wide array of people, whether they
wear one of her pieces on their wrist, display it in their home, or view it in
a museum or gallery. We recently interviewed Teri about her history
and start in beadworking, the sometimes confining definitions of art and craft,
and our ability to communicate through art when we look beyond the
medium.

How did you find that you had the amount of patience necessary for
beadwork?

I started beading when I was
about 8 years old, and I was bead stringing from the moment I could pick up
beads and thread. One of the first big
pieces for me – I was probably about 8 years old and I wanted to make myself my
own necklace to wear with my dance outfit – it was just bead stringing – a 10
strand, bone necklace. And I remember
that my parents gave me this little container with all my beads in it and I
worked on that thing over the summer. I
remember it taking a long time but being really satisfied at the end of it
all. I’ve never been asked that question
before but the first thing that came to my mind was having the patience that I
had to do that first one.

Is it something you find therapeutic or is it simply just more
rewarding at the end?

Part of the personality of
someone who can do beadwork or textiles is obsessive compulsive. I definitely
have that streak. I know that because
after four hours I’ll go to stand up and not be able to – and I realize I’ve
been sitting there for four hours focused like that, without moving. And I know I’m not the only person that does
that. A lot of people talk about it
being therapeutic, and I think the easiest way to relate it to someone who
isn’t a beadworker is if you’re a runner or a swimmer or even a motorcyclist,
you get on your bike and your head is full of stuff and you go for a ride and
then when you come back you’re clear.
That’s kind of how beadworking is.
Because once the design work is done, you’re basically machining
color, and that’s the therapeutic part of it.

You’ve mentioned in interviews that when you made your piece Indian Parade on an umbrella, it was the
first time you’ve considered yourself an artist. What made that mental shift for you – and
what did you consider yourself before?

Beadworker. And still when people ask me what I do, I
answer “beadworker”. Then when I get a
confused, puzzled look, I tell them, “artist”.
When I’m in the rest of the (non-Native) world, they ask me what I do
and I say I’m a beadworker, and that’s where the confusion comes – that’s where
I found I needed to make a distinction and explain that I am an artist with
something to say. And I think with that
piece [Indian Parade] I realized that I could speak through that medium. Every
single stitch I did on there I did with purpose. That’s something I can say 15 years
later. At the time, I was struggling
with the identifiers, the language that was put upon Native artists. And I was
struggling because I wanted to be known as a beadworker because to me, beadworking
is like saying, “I’m a painter”.

The whole issue of craft and art,
craft versus fine art, became really apparent to me when PBS contacted me to be
included in a program [Craft in America] that explores the idea of craft as art. That’s when it made sense to me how Native
art had been seen as craft and that there was this shift under our feet where
people were starting to recognize it as fine art: silver belts and silver
jewelry were starting to be seen as fine art.

I started to see the nuances in
how it was being talked about. I
realized through PBS and the other craftspeople featured that this is something
that all craftspeople struggle with.
Somebody that does hand work, where the hand of the artist is required
to finish the work from beginning to end – that’s the work that’s kind of been
looked down upon- and that’s part of larger art definitions and all that.

I started to think about where my
work fit into these larger ideas. I was really conscious of racial distinctions
and the way the whole of Native art was ghettoized within larger craft and fine
art spheres.

Are there times you can recall that you found the definitions of craft
and art really limiting or holding you back?

There have been times when it’s
been clear that a viewer dislikes that I’ve used large beads. Now, the material itself is as valuable as
the other material that I use; it’s just that they’re larger. I need to do that to make large canvases – a 6
foot canvas, for example. I thought I
had innovated in some way in order to do that, so I was surprised when I received
criticism for using large beads, specifically.
But it seems that they are only seeing the medium, rather than the
composition, the meaning, all the other things that you would look at fine art
with – you know, I would never look at a Rothko and be like, “Oh well, he only
used acrylic paint…that’s cheap!”

I’m very aware
as an artist that my part is to educate the larger audience to look beyond the
medium. Look beyond what has traditionally been identified as authentic or real
or Native or whatever those words are and to look at it as an expression.

Where do you most want to see your pieces displayed?

I should make a distinction – I
have basically two things that I do: jewelry and art pieces. And I didn’t realize this until Jamie and Jed
at Shiprock did this crazy photograph… an ad in the paper where they had all
these amazing Native jewelers and they also included one of my beaded pieces.
When Jamie sent it to me, it was the first time I had ever thought of myself as
a jeweler. I had always made jewelry, from the get-go I made jewelry, but in my
head I had always thought of it as “Those are my little beaded trinkets.” I
never thought my jewelry could stand toe-to-toe with all those jewelers, even
though I was getting good money for my pieces.

I had always thought more about
my artwork. For me - this is how I’ve always done it – I get really intense on
a piece or a series of pieces, whatever it is that I’m working on artwork-wise
– my heart and soul goes into it, and I feel like they’re babies once their
born. My baby is done, I completed it
and then I’ll switch to doing jewelry because to me the jewelry is fun, it
doesn’t have as much intense thought.
Although some of it does have meaning, it’s not quite the same.

I don’t ever mean to say that
jewelry is not art – just for me, in terms of commitment to an idea and
intensity involved in the project, my jewelry making is a much lighter process.

But the idea of decorating the
human form as a part of feeling beautiful and admired is important to me. When
I was growing up, my mother [Jeri Ah-be-hill] had a trading post – my sister
[Keri Ataumbi] and I had jewelry since the moment we were born. We came out of
the hospital and she put a bracelet on our wrist. Jewelry is a universal form
all humans can relate to. I love the idea of creating pieces so people can
decorate themselves with meaning and beauty. That is my main goal in making
jewelry.

At the same time, I have these
other things I want to say, and they can only be said in a certain way with
certain objects. When I do the artwork it is oftentimes something that has been
rolling around in my head, almost like a thorn in a shoe. It bugs me until I
have to deal with it. I have to think about it. I have to research it. And then I
have to figure out how I am going to tell that story visually.

For these pieces that aren’t wearable – Would you prefer to see them in
homes, galleries, museums?

I tend to run towards the
educator in me. I have this thing that I
want to say – I want it to be so beautiful, even if it’s a really difficult
subject matter, people are interested enough to walk up to it and try to
understand it. The more people that see
it, the more I feel I have helped the understanding between Native America and
the rest of the world. And so my bottom
line of where I want things to go – I just want them to go someplace where that
communication can continue.

Teri is a fascinating person who can really articulate her
perspective as a Native American working as an artist and jeweler today.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview, which we’ll post in a few
days!